The company’s functional protein flour made from upcycled defatted sunflower seeds has 3x the protein and 2x the fiber at the same cost of wheat flour. The company protein concentrate is allergen free unlike Soy having twice as lower price.

PLANETARIANS’ process was tested at the University of Minnesota, scalability tests resulted in investment from manufacturing partner Cereal Docks. PLANETARIANS ingredients won AgFunder Innovation Award 2019 and scored investments from Barilla’s venture arm Blue1877 and Amadori.

Mission

At PLANETARIANS, we are on a relentless mission to make healthy ingredients affordable via sustainable manufacturing. Our goal is to redirect 100% of the sunflower defatted seeds into direct human consumption by 2030.

Our roadmap has the following key results:

Show via cooperation with global brands that sustainable manufacturing is a successful business as measured by the partnership with brands in 7 key categories

Show that food from upcycled ingredients is not only healthy, but also delicious, as measured by 10 public recipes in key categories

Demonstrate the financial incentives for vegetable oil companies to repurpose defatted seeds into the food market in every region of the globe, as measured by the partnership with at least one plant in every part of the world

Standardize and certify ingredients for b2b customers and all-purpose flour for b2c customers as measured by the start of sales on the trading boards

Make ingredients available for same day purchase or next day delivery at the price matching all-purpose flour

Demonstrate that upcycling of oil cake has nutritional benefits for people and improves the planet by reducing CO2, water and land use.

We have the technology to do it, but we can’t do it alone. To bring upcycled ingredients to consumers around the world, we’ll need the help of processors, brands, and entrepreneurs.

History

We started PLANETARIANS’ after stumbling into an opportunity that seemed almost too good to be true.

In late 2016, we visited a sunflower oil processing facility where the defatted sunflower seed after being pressed for oil, was sold as cattle feed, having more protein inside than we get back from beef. Isn’t it ridiculous?

Curiosity got the best of us and we started asking questions about this hard, woodchip-like byproduct. But the more we learned, the more we started scratching our heads. So ...why are we feeding this high-protein ingredient to cows only to end up getting less protein back by eating beef?

It was such crazy inefficiency that we couldn’t help but see an opportunity. Why not figure out how to process this byproduct into a nutritious flour that can be used to bring affordable protein to more people? With all of the byproducts from oil processing alone, you could feed 1.5 billion people without growing a single crop.

The prospect was simply too exciting to ignore. We spent the next several years developing our technology, learning how to commercialize our products, and cooking up recipes in our test kitchen. Today, we have a healthy flour ready to add protein and fiber to nearly any food product.

Our story has been an exciting one so far, but it’s just getting started. We can’t wait to write our next chapter by partnering with brands and entrepreneurs that want to build a healthier and more sustainable world, one ingredient at a time.